I Just Watched...

Marsha Marsha Marsha! 

1/1/23
Abbott & Costello Go to Mars (Universal, 1953)
Source: TCM

As Ben M. pointed out in his intro, Abbott & Costello don't actually go to Mars in this one. They go to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, which is weird enough to make them think they're on Mars (has TCM ever had a theme of Mardi Gras movies?), and then they go to Venus. I think they put Mars in the title because ever since HG Welles, it had been the planet in our solar system that held the greatest fascination with the public. One item in a set of similar items always seems to hold prominence. Aside: for example, I remember when many items on restaurant menus and in grocery stores contained spinach, and in the last 10 years, almost all of them have replaced the spinach with kale, which has recently been recognized as a "superfood" and holds a higher fascination with the pulblic.

I wonder if on New Year's Day we've already had the only time the entire year of 2023 that TCM shows two Universal features back-to-back. They may have blown their budget on that already. After what I assume was a successful run of movies pairing Bud & Lou with the actors who played the monsters in the studio's legendary run of horror films from 10 to 20 years earlier, Universal apparently decided to jump on current trends and get the duo in a sci fi millieu. Heck, if the franchise's popularity had continued, I could envision only a few years later Abbott & Costello Meet Elvis, were he not already under contract at MGM (and occasionally working at Paramount - not sure how that worked out). The particulars of space travel weren't as widely known as they would be by the time of The Reluctant Astronuat, so it looks like the filmmakers mostly had to guess. They got some things right - helmeted suits to provide oxygen, the general layout of a space capsule - but the rocket looked to me more Flash Gordon than NASA, and of course, they were way off about life on Venus (unless there's a government cover-up!).

We open on Lou as some kind of volunteer worker at I think an orphanage or some type of school (so we immedoately know he's a good guy) where he's demonstrating a toy rocket ship he swings around on a string and spouts the same kind of dubious rocket science knowledge we see Don Knotts spouting in The Reluctant Astronaut. And like in that movie, the children are eager to challenge what he knows (Ben M. says one of the children is played by Harry Shearer, who went on to This is Spinal Tap and The Simpsons - I think he's the voice of Mr. Burns and other supporting characters - but I don't know which one he was). In classic movie trope fashion (think Bing Crosby substituting in right field in Going My Way), a window gets broken, and a cop begins chasing Lou, who hides in the back of a delivery truck driven by Bud, which is en route to a space agency (it was 1953; I don't know that NASA had been created yet - it's not named in the movie. It's just a more generic "space agency"). Thanks to contrived name similarity, Lou's character is briefly mistaken for a visiting scientist of prominence, an Italian, which requires Lou to put on some semi-offensive "Whattsamatta you?" affectations. This bit doesn't last long. The next sequence is not heavily plot-driven, but Bud and Lou somehow wander onto a rocket ship primed for launch - and within minutes they're zooming through the Holland Tunnel. They touch down in the aforementioned New Orleans, where everyone's wearing giant paper mache masks (which is apparently what you used to do at Mardi Gras before flashing your chest for beads became the primary activity) that do have a creepily effective alien quality, so the comic duo aren't necessarily portrayed as stupid for thinking they've arrived on Mars. They cross paths with a pair of escaped convicts who are in possession of a paralysis ray gun (I went to the bathroom and into the kitchen to make dinner - I missed the backstory of this plot development). The convicts resemble to some degree Lou and Bud and weren't to me terribly compelling, but they serve as foils most of the rest of the way. Back to the rocket ship, and now the quartet end up on Venus, where they encounter a group of Femizons all played by various Miss Universe contestants (You know, Men are from Mars, Women are from ... well, you get it). You saw these kinds of female bands in more serious science fiction movies, but they're mostly played for a chuckle here.

I thought the production values were unusually strong, given the '50s were loaded with cheaply put together Destination Moon knock-offs. Longtime A&C fans will no doubt notice the absence of the trope of stepping away from the plot so the duo can go into one of their famous stage/radio routines about who's on first or marrying a 10-year-old (it's in one of their movies, I swear! Maybe more than one, actually).

Lucky Dan gave me instructions on how to load an image, but it's not on this web page, and just like the old message boards, if I move away from here before posting, all the text i've typed will disappear before I return. So, I"m not doing that again this time. But I will read those instructions carefully and hopefully there will be visuals for my next "review".

Total movies seen this year: 2

Been many a moon since I saw that.

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